Anyone that thinks Jacksonville is cold has never worked in the Northern Rockies or Alaska.
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We lived in Colorado Springs for a couple of years. Loved the climate. Almost never used the AC in the warm months. Standing in snow in a t-shirt with the sun shining and not being cold is cool, just don’t get in the shade.
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The summer in San Francisco.
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In January 1994 I was working at a power plant scrubber project in the mountains of Central Pennsylvania during a record cold spell. Like most jobs of this ilk, the thing was lagging behind schedule so the utility refused to allow us to shut down the job, which had 100 job trailers and over 1500 hardhats working on it. The temperatures on the worst day hit -32 F with wind chills below -45 F. For 3 entire weeks the temps never got above 0. In the vast scrubber building, which was still partially open to the elements, all the steel beams, ducts and pipes became coated with inches of white rime so it was not only impossible to do any welding, but you couldn’t even thread conduit because the lubricant in the cutting machines froze to sludge and workers’ skin would stick to any metal they touched. The only interior area which could possibly be worked in was the controls structure which we loaded up with rented propane heaters and wedged 150 electricians into to try to get something done.
We had to park in a remote lot and walk 1/2 to 1 mile into our crew trailers on the crowded site but the crawler cranes and big trucks had not only compacted all the deep snow that had accumulated in weeks of heavy storms, but that snowpack had turned to ice. By mid January 7 people had fallen and broken bones just walking around. There were also several incidents of minor digital frostbite that required medical attention. Even a few seconds of skin exposure was painful. I kept the lower half of my face covered with a neoprene mask and slathered my cheeks and forehead with Vaseline.
Since I had been a long time winter backpacker, backcountry skier and alpine mountaineer (including working for a wilderness outfitter and selling winter gear), I had all the gear I needed to keep warm and comfortable, but a lot of the crew didn’t know to dress so I ended up pitching our usual mandated weekly safety meeting topics (ladders, hardhats, electrical safety, etc.) and instead handed out guides I typed up for what to get in the way of cold protective clothing and how to wear it. The guys went from teasing me about coming to work looking like Nanook of the North to taking my cues.
It was so cold that the contents of the Porto-Potties froze solid and could not be sucked out when the honey wagon showed up. Also, the windows on some of the workers vehicles exploded from the cold.
I recall trudging alone from my job trailer through the vast site to the parking lot after dark through the frozen slot that had been plowed through the snow drifts, with the wind howling and nearly blowing me over and thinking that this must be what it’s like to be in Siberia or the Alaskan North Slope in the winter.
The worst part of those bitter weeks was that the fuel line in my Caravan froze solid so I was trapped there and could not drive back home as I usually did every other night (it was a 90 minute drive in the best of weather). Company had bought an old rooming house in the tiny town where the power plant was located to give us a place to stay during the work week (and to avoid having to pay us each $75 a day in contractual travel expenses.) It had a dirt floor basement and the place smelled like wet mud, I was sharing it with 9 guys and the tiny dining room had been walled off with a door to give me my own bedroom, which had sliding doors to the back yard and a full view of the clamorous power plant itself. A cheap chandelier loomed over my lumpy sagging cot. After 5 days of being stuck there I hauled a couple of 100’ extension cords from the jobsite, connected my hair dryer inside the house, ran it out to the street, crawled under the van and defrosted the fuel line so I could go home
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Now that’s a story!
Willowleaf,
That is cold for PA.
I worked construction in Colorado as a commercial electrician for a few years in the 1980s. It was -36 F degrees in my driveway every morning. Over a 10 day period working outside, the warmest temperature we experienced was -7 F. The wind made it much worse. We ate 4 meals a day. By noon little work was getting done, we were just trying to stay warm.
We got some complaints from the foreman working in a closed up building with heat next door. Finally I brought him the US Army Manual describing the decrease in inefficiency with cold temperatures. He shut up after that.
Frosbite is real. You have to learn to recognize it.
When I think of cold, the first thing that comes to mind was having to use an ice scraper on the insides of the windows while driving to go skiing in Wyoming from Colorado. It was so cold that the car wouldn’t warm up enough to make much heat, but the humidity from our breathing was frosting the windows.
That skiing was unreal though. Very few people, amazing powder. Completely different than the icy slopes we have in New England
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Right Mike.
The common trick when the weather gets cold in Wyo and MT is too add some cardboard in front of radiator.
I used to cross country ski in Wyo all winter. We used wax in those days. Put on special green in the fall. No need to change it.
…or wants to…again.
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Cold is a state of mind.
And the mind can be in awful state.
Fifteen million Kelvin at the heart of the sun,
makes you shiver to consider such a fate.
As Scott laid upon the blizzard shelf,
grasping cold thoughts in a feverish state of mind,
eleven miles from salvation candle waned in desperation.
With the mercury we sink into unkind.
Hey, but then look on the bright (and warm) side! Right, Willowleaf? I mean, after paying out 200-feet of inflexible, stubbornly unyielding extension, getting down on the frozen tundra and glissing under the ole Chrysler product (traditionally bulky starters from MOPAR, so free-flow petrol’s no guarantee), and then throwing that amp-suck Conair switch, AT LEAST you didn’t trip a breaker! OR, WORSE, blow a fuse with no replacements in that rooming house of musty mountain memory. Just imagine the verbal heat exchange melting the tundra with that scenario!
No question that blocking the grille would have helped. I was much younger and my buddy’s father was driving so not much for me to do. Besides, I was too damn excited to ski in Wyoming to care about being a little cold. 
I can relate – that was my gig too in the 1980’s, commercial and industrial electrical construction. I did really love the work (being the only female on the job site most of the time my coworkers nicknamed me “Sparkette”) except during really hot weather. But once I reached crew chief status my employer stumbled on the fact that I had a college degree and management background and dragged me into the office for PM and estimator training. At first I resisted, knowing I would work longer hours, be stuck in an office too much, take a pay cut initially and not be doing such interesting and satisfying hands-on work (as well as staying super fit while I did it.) But when I mused on the prospect of being in that danged bucket truck splicing overhead cable in ice storms and wrestling 4" rigid into ductbanks as I got older I stopped fighting it and accepted the transfer.
I did really enjoy being able to eat whatever and as much as I wanted and still staying trim during those years in the tools. And I still like driving past big installations like the hospitals, power plants, schools, county jails and even our local subway and light rail systems and being able to think “I built that.”
Yeah, it was danged cold some days. But layers of fleece inside those quilt-lined Dickies coveralls, thick wool socks with insulated workboots and a thermal hard hat liner was probably the most comfortable job “uniform” of any job I ever had. It was like going to work wearing a cozy sleeping bag. Had to work out a careful dance in the cramped porto-potties though (one of the drawbacks of being female on a job site and sharing the facilities with 200 guys). After pulling myself out of the upper half of the coveralls, I’d have to carefully stuff each sleeve down the pants legs so they didn’t flop into the urinal (or the inevitable oversplash on the floor) before hovering. And hover I did – fortunately I had already developed a very strong squat back in those days due to my frequent backpacking trips. No way was I going to contact those freaking porto-potty seats. Eew.
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Have you ever been in the northern Rockies or Alaska?
I flew over them I October '74. I was hoping we didn’t crash land in all that white stuff.
I’ve lived where it gets pretty cold: mountain valleys in Utah, Northern Colorado, Wisconsin, Michigan and Norway. Coldest I remember clearly temperature wise was staying New Years in Yellowstone National Park on a snowmobile trip when I was a senior in high school, temperature was -50 F, wind chill was -90. Coldest I have ever felt was in Norway with bitter winds, blowing snow and I have no idea what the temperature was, probably around -20 F. My wife grew up in a mountain valley in Utah and the winter before we got married I stayed at her house over Christmas. It got down to -41 F, and my car would not start. Her dad helped me get it running by taking the spark plugs out and heating them on a coal stove in the kitchen, he took the plugs out in his shirt sleeves with bare hands, I was wearing a coat and gloves and hat and was freezing to death. His comment was “yeah it’s a bit nippy this year.” My wife inherited her family farm and we usually spend the holidays there. Our family joke is we sit around New Years Eve and watch the thermometer drop, with global warming lately it only gets down to about -20 F.
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Coldest still air temperature I ever experienced while recreating outdoors was in the New Hampshire White Mountains the week between Xmas and New Year back in the 70’s when I went up there with my outdoor club to do winter mountaineering practice and ice climbing. One night that we spent in an unheated cabin it got so cold one of those 5 gallon collapsible water jugs we had filled in the evening was frozen solid by morning – when we drove into North Conway town later the next day the illuminated date and temperature display outside a bank that cycled between Fahrenheit and Centigrade was displaying the same number for both: minus 40 (the only temp that is the same reading for both systems.) We heard that the temps at the summit of Mount Washington that night came close to the lowest recorded there (-50 back in 1885 and -47 in 1934). The windchill up there was around 65 below. At that temp any exposed human flesh freezes solid in 60 seconds.
We bailed on our plans to try an ascent of Hillman’s Highway on that trip (which we had done the year before in milder weather) and stuck with ski touring and ice climbing in the sheltered valleys out of the wind.
But the night of New Years we were sharing the bunkhouse (also unheated) behind the home of the manager of the North Conway EMS with several of the store’s young employees who lived there during the winter season – all of them were climbers and skiers who were on the local Appalachian Mountain Rescue Patrol. Just before midnight they were called out to begin a search for a solo hiker who had apparently intended to camp camp overnight in the National Forest – he had failed to return and his friends called him in missing and the rescue was mustered. Kind of put a damper on our celebrations knowing that the poor guy was up there alone in that maelstrom of frigid wind. They found him a couple of days later, dead and frozen solid in his tent.
Dang - you guys are talkin’ cold. -40 & -50 I don’t believe I’ve ever seen. Coldest I’ve camped is -20. A friend and I did it more or less as a lark, with a good escape plan, and it was fun. Dug a nice pit in the snow for shelter from some of the wind and got a roaring fire going. My only complaint about that outing was that I’d quit drinking at that point and my buddy hadn’t. Discovered that bottles of NA beer freeze and break while real beer doesn’t.
I worked as a snow maker for four years, but in Wisconsin we don’t see those really low temps like youse guys do in the mountains. Many nights in the 0 through -10 range, but that’s about it. I don’t recall ever feeling very cold in all those nights… cold fingers, sure, and chilblains the first season, but never anything near really threatening.
But the coldest nights weren’t the nights where we got coldest in terms of comfort. When it got below zero we were cranking out the snow. We were running between machines all night long to keep the snow as evenly spread as possible, avoid breaking branches (and the resultant chain saw work) when winds shifted, and burying the fire hoses that supplied the machines. We were burning lotsa’ calories and keeping them trapped in the insulated coveralls.
I think the times I’ve most dangerously courted cold has always been at warmer temperatures when I got caught engaged in some activity that I couldn’t really extricate myself from until the project was done, when I was under-dressed, and I had gotten wet. A drizzly day in the mid-30s when I was on a roof installing solar panels on the banks of a windy ice-covered lake leaps to mind.
And a late fall motor boat fishing trip near Perrault Falls ONT (~50 deg N) with my late father… He was getting older and realized this might be his last time on waters that he’d loved all his life. There was a waterfall he had to see one more time and we just kept pushing - again temps in the mid 20s - 30s, not really all that cold. While fishing our way there the bait casting reels started freezing up. We gave up on fishing and went to see the falls, in wind and waves that threw spray on us all the way. We were seriously cold when we got back to the canvas tent heated only by Coleman lantern. We were (again) shivering badly enough to make it darned hard to heat onion soup. That’s closer to serious hypothermia than one wants to get. But its a long long way from the temps many of us encounter routinely.
I think its a bit self-deceptive to define cold by a thermometer reading.
I would hate to fall in the water with a rechargeable battery strapped to me, both because of the possibility of electric shock, though maybe they have allowed for that and the extra weight.
A drysuit means 40 degrees and raining is no big deal. They are pricey, mine was around $500, but I can be in 40 degree water with no ill effects, while without it my survival may be only measured in minutes.
– Andrew
I literally did that one afternoon at our old home in the foothills. Usually winter temps peaked in early to mid afternoon and then dropped as the sun moved behind the steep ridges, a more gradual decrease.
This time, every few minutes I saw the outdoor thermometer registering several degrees colder. It was happening right before my eyes. A difference of 20 to 40 degrees between daytime max and wee hours min was normal. This time, it happened in less than four hours, all of during the afternoon.
Dry air at higher elevation does amazing things. We wear sunscreen almost 365/365.
I spent seven years on Baffin Island in the Arctic where it was frequently minus plenty. The ice on the fjord in winter was 7’ thick and by mid summer the water was about 4*
I built a skin on frame kayak and had many great paddles including in shoulder season paddling between icebergs. Mind blowing scenery! If I could figure out how to, I would post a few photos:-)
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